Global Policy Forum

By Julian Borger and Richard Norton-Taylor

Weapons experts last night agreed that the empty chemical warheads found yesterday in Iraq represented a formal breach in Baghdad's UN agreements but appeared to fall short of the dramatic "smoking gun" Washington is seeking to oust Saddam Hussein.

Much will depend, however, on a battery of tests on the rocket casings to determine whether chemicals were ever poured into them and how long ago.

The Iraqis claim that the Katyusha rockets were remnants of long abandoned weapons programmes, but even so they may still represent a violation of Iraq's UN obligations as they appear not to have been included in Iraq's December declaration on its weapons stockpiles.

David Albright, a former weapons inspector and the current head of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), said that if Iraq knew the warheads existed and they are for chemical weapons, "then that is a violation of the [1991] ceasefire agreement which prohibits Iraq from having chemical weapons or the wherewithal to make chemical weapons."

Loren Thompson, a Pentagon consultant at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia, said that if no traces of chemical weapons are found by UN tests and no chemical agents are found nearby, there would be no conclusive evidence of an active chemical weapons programme.

"This is not the proverbial smoking gun. A real smoking gun would be an armed weapon," Mr Thompson said. "But these canisters were found in remarkably good condition to be old war me mentoes. Their recent origin doesn't draw one to think they are old weapons that were simply overlooked."

He pointed out that the discovery came only a few days after the US began providing intelligence to the weapons inspectors to assist their search. "This will probably be the first of many, many similar finds that cumulatively will provide a picture of non-compliance."

Terence Taylor, a weapons inspector in the 1990s, described the find as important. He argued the fact that the warheads were empty was not significant. "They could be quickly filled: the chemicals can be hidden more easily."

In its declarations to the UN, Iraq claimed to have had a stockpile of 6,610 122mm rockets filled with sarin, a lethal gas, and 6,880 unfilled canisters of the same calibre, and almost all were accounted for by the UN and destroyed under UN supervision. Iraq also claimed to have destroyed 26,500 unfilled 122mm rockets unilaterally, but earlier UN inspectors could only account for 11,500 of them.

On December 7, a UN team in Iraq secured a dozen artillery shells filled with mustard gas that had been listed during earlier inspections in the 1990s. The weapons found yesterday, however, appear not to have been on any earlier inventory.

Another former weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, an opponent of military action, said the key question was whether Iraq had attempted to conceal the warheads or whether it had simply overlooked them.

Matthew Meselson, a weapons expert at Harvard's International Security Programme, said that the US had in the past lost track of chemical and biological weapons from abandoned programmes and that warheads had turned up from time to time.

"If these canisters are new and show signs of recent machine-shop work, then that is one thing, but if not, it's less than trivial," he said. "It would be unfortunate if they go to war over bad book-keeping."

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